A mixed-strategy based gravitational search algorithm for parameter identification of hydraulic turbine governing system

A Mixed-Strategy based Gravitational Search Algorithm (MS-GSA) is proposed in this paper, in which three improvement strategies are mixed and integrated in the standard GSA to enhance the optimization ability. The first improvement strategy is introducing elite agent's guidance into movement function to accelerate convergence speed. The second one is designing an adaptive gravitational constant function to keep a balance between the exploration and exploitation in the searching process. And the third improvement strategy is the mutation strategy based on the Cauchy and Gaussian mutations for overcoming the shortages of premature. The MS-GSA has been verified by comparing with 7 popular meta-heuristics algorithms on 23 typical basic benchmark functions and 7 CEC2005 composite benchmark functions. The results on these benchmark functions show that the MS-GSA has achieved significantly better performance than other algorithms. The effectiveness and significance of the results have been verified by Wilcoxon's test. Finally, the MS-GSA is employed to solve the parameter identification problem of Hydraulic turbine governing system (HTGS). It is shown that the MS-GSA is able to identify the parameters of HTGS effectively with higher accuracy compared with existing methods. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.